Aorus GA-AX370 Gaming K5 mobo trims a little fat

So much functionality has been moved from the motherboard into the CPU itself that variations within a product line often come down to little details. That's the case with Gigabyte's Aorus GA-AX370-Gaming K5. This motherboard is a full ATX affair with four DDR4 DIMM slots, three metal-reinforced PCIe slots, four USB 3.1 ports, and support for AMD's latest Ryzen CPUs. Overall, the board is quite similar to the Aorus GA-AX370-Gaming K7 we described a few weeks ago, with only a couple of niche features pared back.

The most obvious difference between the Gaming K7 and the new Gaming K5 is in the motherboards' networking section. The Gaming K7 has an Intel Gigabit Ethernet controller and a Killer E2500 802.11ac Wi-Fi chip, while the Gaming K5 makes do with just the Intel wired networking adapter. The other main difference we could tease out from the specifications is in the audio section. The Gaming K7 sports two Realtek ALC1220 codecs—one each for the front and rear audio outputs. The Gaming K5 soldiers on with just one of these chips. The Gaming K7 also has nine temperature sensors, eight fan headers, and two additional headers for temperature probes. The Gaming K5 knocks the number of temperature sensors down to six and the number of fan headers to five. The headers for thermistors didn't make the cut either.

These are probably minor omissions for most users. What remains is still a pretty full-featured package. The board supports all AMD AM4 CPUs including seventh-generation APUs and the entire Ryzen lineup. The Gaming K5 is compatible with two-card SLI and Crossfire setups. The single M.2 slot is ready to accept PCIe x4 NVMe storage devices, to go along with up to eight onboard SATA drives. When the zoned RGB lighting is disabled, the Gaming K5 has a subdued black-and-gray look. Once the switch is thrown, the DIMM slots, PCIe slots, and other areas on the board light up in any of 16.8 million colors, controlled by Gigabyte's RGB Fusion software.